of many preferments which they may part with, and with their qualification, and any obligation from it, when they meet with a better invitation. But let us take a view of those men, who in former ages, from very private and scholastic education, have come to great eminency of place and employment, and we shall then discover how much of their qualifications had its original from education: not to take any advantage from their Pope Celestine, who for his sanctity was sent for out of his cell, and crowned pope; and for his extreme want of understanding and ordinary discretion, was within six weeks persuaded to give over his place that he could not manage.

There cannot be three men named, who from the meanest birth and low breeding, grew to so great fame and lustre, and made themselves more illustrious, than our Cardinal Wolsey, Cardinal Ximenes in Spain, both which lived together, and Sixtus Quintus, who was afterwards pope, and who was born whilst the other two lived. The first of these was the son of a poor butcher; who sent him indeed to the university, but was so far from being able to maintain him there, that he was compelled to leave it, and to be contented to keep a poor school in the country, which is no contemplative life, and was near thirty years of age before he was taken notice of; yet grew afterwards, by a

persons

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succession of employments, to be esteemed of great industry and vivacity, which seldom go together; and from thence to as great a height of worldly glory as a subject is capable of. But nothing of this was owing to his contemplation, but the pure effect of his activity and conversation in the greatest courts of Christendom, and with the the greatest princes, by whom he was received into great familiarity and trust; and if he had not been accompanied with two very great vices, from the poverty and lowness of his birth, the one of pride, and the other of pusillanimity, he might have been as glorious in his death as he was in his life: but an exorbitant pride grew up with him, as it is most natural to those of the meanest extraction, to so unheard-of a degree, that he made all the great nobility of the kingdom his mortal enemies, upon contests which had no relation to religion; and then his pusillanimity was in truth his death, when all the indignation of the king could not have taken his life from him; but his poor spirit, that had been so immoderately blown up with his prosperity, expired, at being reduced to live in a lower orb: whereas he might have raised a nobler monument of his virtue in his magnanimous behaviour in his misfortunes, than he hath left behind him in his palace at Westminster, and his college of Christ-Church in Oxford. The second, who

had at least as obscure an original, and in some respects made a more glorious progress in the world, and died of the same dispirited disease, Cardinal Ximenes, was the son of a poor smith, thrown into a monastery of Franciscan friars, who charitably took care of his education according to the woful rules and constitutions of their founder. However, in a kingdom where good clothes nor good looks contribute nothing to advancement, he found means to make himself known and grateful to the greatest prince at that time in Europe, and of the greatest sagacity, and the highest dissimulation, that any age hath brought out; and under this prince this friar grew to be a cardinal, and which is better, Archbishop of Toledo, and did many the most magnanimous actions which can be performed by the greatest subject; for besides the building many noble palaces, which he left to that mighty archbishopric, and besides the princely structure of his college and monastery, which upon the matter contains the whole university of Alcola; for all the public schools and all the professors are of his foundation in his college, all the other colleges not being to be named with many of our halls; he raised at his own charges (to vindicate the honour of his nation, for all indignities, contumelies, and calamities, it had for so many hundred years undergone by the Moors) an army,

provided ships for their transportation, and conducted them himself in the expedition, invaded the neighbour part of Africa, defeated an army of the Moors, and took the city of Oran; which, with some other places he left and annexed to the crown of Spain, they possess to this day. This man indeed knew little more of the transactions of the world, than he learned in the court of his own master and by his instructions, the great Ferdinando; who, being at the age of eighteen years married to the heiress and queen of Castile, was seldom after named without her till after her death: and indeed the world had not a stage upon which more or greater business was acted, than the court of that prince; who was the founder of the Spanish monarchy, left the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily annexed to it, and the title to all that in Italy which hath been since possessed by Spain; nor was there a court in the world where the affairs of all other courts were so much transacted as in this. Under this king was this friar educated; the meanness of whose extraction cannot be concluded from the mean profession of his father; for if he were an Hidalgo, (a gentleman,) as many smiths and men of lower professions are known to be, he would not have married the daughter of the richest merchant in Spain. But let his birth be what it will, and his first studies in the monastery

be contracted and restrained within never so narrow a compass, he lay not long buried there; nor is it probable that he addicted himself much to contemplation there, but had very active thoughts towards the world, for he grew quickly eminent in all the posts through which he passed, from the schools to the pulpit, and from thence to the coun cil and the greatest administrations of state, under a prince that understood and practised all the good and the bad arts of government; was an excellent dispenser of justice, and a most devout professor of religion, when he could with most ease mount by those stairs; and could as well make use of the most profound dissimulation, and the most barefaced perjury, when he found those practices would contribute to his designs: and when he had promoted this well-instructed and well-exercised friar to be a prince of the church, and found him enough acquainted with all the science of government, he committed at his death the greatest part of the managery of it, which he conducted with unquestioned abilities; and if his evening had not discredited his works of the day, in sinking under the discountenance, rather than the displeasure of Charles the Fifth, upon his first entrance into Spain, for the emperor sent only a less compliment to him than he expected, which broke his heart within two days, he had remained to poste